Protecting the white-necked picathartes in Africa

This is a White-necked Picathartes video.

Communities unite to protect White-necked Picathartes

14-04-2008

A survey of the Western Area Peninsula Forest (WAPF) in Sierra Leone has discovered two new breeding colonies of the Vulnerable White-necked Picathartes Picathartes gymnocephalus, in addition to the 16 sites already known. …

White-necked Picathartes is a flagship for bird and habitat conservation in Africa. Its extant population is restricted to the fragmented Upper Guinea forest in Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia and Sierra Leone, with historical records from Ghana – though none since the 1960s.

Liberia urged Firestone bosses to comply with the laws of the land today after it emerged that a rubber factory owned by the US corporation is pumping waste products into a key water source outside Monrovia: here.

Liberia and Sierra Leone move to designate Gola Rainforest as National Park: here. And here.

Fighting Firestone in Liberia: here.

Female genital mutilation, a taboo for journalists too (koolnews.wordpress.com)
Abolition and Empire in Sierra Leone and Liberia (adrianmurdoch.typepad.com)
Lost and Found In Ghana (raxacollective.wordpress.com)
A raft through West Africa’s park of peace (telegraph.co.uk)
2013 Save The Frogs Day Is April 27 (naturalhistorywanderings.com)

9 thoughts on “Protecting the white-necked picathartes in Africa”

20-05-2009

Grey-necked Picathartes conservation – A recently completed study of Grey-necked Picathartes Picathartes oreas [Vulnerable] in the Mbam Minkom – Kala Important Bird Area (IBA) in Cameroon has provided new insights into the species’ conservation. Tail-mounted radio transmitters were successfully used to study six birds, and showed that the method could be used to study other picathartes species. “This study estimated the abundance and distribution of nest sites in the IBA, and served to highlight the imminent likelihood of destruction due to agricultural encroachment and illegal timber exploitation”, said author Dr Awa Taku – The Cameroon Biodiversity Conservation Society (BirdLife in Cameroon). “These results have important implications in decision making to delimit forest boundaries and core areas for protection in the development of management plans”.

http://www.birdlife.org/news/news/2009/05/news_byte_11.html

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Sierra Leone takes steps to save mangroves

by Staff Writers
Freetown (AFP) Feb 27, 2010

Sierra Leone’s fragile mangrove ecosystem risks being depleted if steps are not taken, the country’s forestry director said Saturday after African countries adopted a plan to save coastal mangrove forests.

“There is (a) need to formulate and implement a sustainable policy… and a need for an integrated approach for the safeguard of the environmental and economic benefits of mangrove resources,” Ahmed Mansaray said in a statement broadcast on national radio.

Mansaray spoke a day after Sierra Leone and five other west African countries — Mauritania, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, Gambia and Guinea — signed onto an action plan for sustainable mangrove management in Freetown.

Trees and shrubs that grow in saline areas of the tropics and subtropics, mangroves play a key role as nursery areas for fish and shrimp and in stabilising shorelines, environmentalists say.

Mangroves cover about 760,000 hectares (1.9 million acres) of Sierra Leone — on par with the country’s forest cover, according to government statistics.

But rice cultivation, wood cutting and other activities have taken a toll on the country’s mangrove ecosystem, experts at the Freetown workshop were quoted as saying.

Worldwide, mangrove forests are among the most threatened tropical ecosystems, with pollution, climate change, overharvesting and overfishing among the factors accounting for their disappearance, according to international conservation group WWF.

http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Sierra_Leone_takes_steps_to_save_mangroves_999.html

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